


Y is for Years

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 17:36:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7371226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jessica has deprived Mary of her chance to build a relationship with her child for years; Mary has waited years to get her revenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Y is for Years

As Mary looked down at the body of her dead twin, for a moment she could imagine that none of the last thirty years had happened, that they were still Mary and Jessica, identical, inseparable. Everything that had happened since, Kenneth, Charlotte, Alison, Jason, she could pretend had never happened at all. The she looked at the face so like her own, that had been the cause of so many of her problems, and she knew she had done the right thing. All those years shut up in that place, the years she had been deprived of watching Charlotte grow up, all because of that one lie told by her sister so many years ago. She’d imagined this moment for so long, and now the time was here.

“Charlotte,” she whispered, “this is for us.”

 

Mary:

She had never even been supposed to be there that night. Jessica was the one who had been asked to babysit. But when she got the call saying Jessica was having trouble settling Teddy and needed help, of course she dropped everything to go over. Jessica was her twin, after all. 

And he had genuinely looked fine when they’d put him to bed. Or at least he had to Mary. He’d been quiet while she watched some stupid movie she couldn’t even remember now, but she’d thought he’d been asleep. If she’d only checked on him during the evening, if she’d noticed something was wrong, if she’d tried to get medical attention earlier, could Teddy have been saved? Would she have been believed that he’d been shaken in Jessica’s care, not hers?

She would never know. Jessica had become hysterical when questioned, insisted that he’d been fine when Mary took over, and that it must have been Mary, and Jessica had been believed. So Mary was torn away from everything she knew, from her friends, abandoned by her family, and shut away in Radley, where she’d be woken at night by screams coming from the neighbouring rooms.

Sometimes she had nightmares that the screams were Teddy, that she knew something was wrong, but she remained rooted to the Carvers’ couch, unable to help.

Jessica:

She hadn’t actually sneaked out to meet a guy at all. She’d lain there on her bed, shaking, unable to believe what had happened, bracing herself for the phone call, for her parents to come in, for her to be taken away. Instead, they’d believed her, believed that since Jessica claimed Teddy had been fine when she went home sick, it must have happened when he was in Mary’s care. Mary had pleaded her innocence, but no one had listened to her. She’d come out with the story about Jessica sneaking off to meet her date, but when their parents had verified that Jessica had come home sick and Mary kept insisting she hadn’t, it just ended up with Mary becoming more hysterical. If anything, with every accusation she screamed at Jessica, Mary dug her own grave.

She still couldn’t quite believe that everyone had accepted her story that baby Teddy had been fine when she left the house and it must have been Mary who had done something. It hadn’t been a deliberate plan. But now she had everything the way she had wanted; she was Number 1 with her parents, with their friends. In time the family moved, wanting to put the blot on the landscape that was Mary behind them, leaving her in Radley. When Jessica started at college, met Kenneth DiLaurentis and started getting to know his friends, if the subject ever came up she claimed to be an only child. It was easier that way. The family displayed no photos of Mary, her name was never spoken. 

One time she did let something slip, and that was with Peter Hastings, not long after their affair began. He’d listened to the official version of the Mary tale, the one where Jessica admitted that she sometimes missed the sisters they had been before, and he’d tried to understand. But Jessica had wondered what he would think if he ever knew what had really happened, that she had been the one to cause baby Teddy’s injuries. That had been the deciding factor in her persuading Kenneth to move away, more than the uncertainty and then later the knowledge that Jason was Peter’s child. That last she could have handled, but the first…No. She had to distance herself. She could start afresh, put the past behind her.

But it wasn’t long before Jessica knew she could never leave the past behind.

Mary:

At first she hadn’t understood why Jessica was showing up at Radley now, after so many years of silence. Was she finally prepared to take responsibility for what she had done? But no, it became clear that that wasn’t why she was there at all. 

She was there to talk about what was going to happen to Mary’s baby when it was born, about how it had been decided that she wasn’t fit to look after the child, that once the baby was born it would be removed from her care and handed over to Jessica and Kenneth.

She was the one doing most of the talking. He was just sat there dumbfounded, gaping at her like an idiot. It appeared that this was the first Kenneth had known that Jessica had a twin at all, and he appeared uncertain what to make of it, of her. What explanation had he been given before he was brought here, the same old bullshit Jessica had fed their parents all those years ago?

And look at her, stomach almost as round as Mary’s own. Jessica had her own child on the way, and yet she still intended to take Mary’s. Everything that had ever been Mary’s, Jessica had taken from her, and now she was going to take her child too. And that wasn’t even taking into account that they were actually proposing taking her child and handing it over to the person who’d shaken Teddy Carver in the first place….

A red mist swam before Mary’s eyes, and before she even knew what she was doing she had launched herself at Jessica, leading to the doctors removing her from the room. If there had been any chance of the decision being reversed, it was gone now. She understood after the fact that her outburst had only proved the point that the baby would be unsafe in her care.

 

Jessica:

She had no idea what had really happened. She’d been outside with Jason talking to their neighbour, then rushed in when she heard Kenneth yelling and Charles screaming, only to find Charles with Alison in the bath.

“It’s your sister all over again,” Kenneth had growled. “History repeating itself. It’s lucky I walked in when I did, or we’d have had another tragedy on our hands. We can’t have him around Ali, Jessica. He’s got to go.”

A part of Jessica wanted to intervene, to point out that it was possible that the explanation Charles was trying to give them was true, that none of them had seen what had happened and they couldn’t be sure there was any sinister intent on his part. But she also knew that even if she did, Kenneth could never be sure, and even if he stayed, every time Kenneth looked at Charles after that, Jessica would see the same expression on his face that her own family had always directed at Mary, that should have been directed at her. He’d be a permanent reminder of what had happened all those years ago.

“You’re right,” Jessica had said. “I’ll make some calls.”

Alison wouldn’t remember Charles. She was too young. Kenneth told Jason that “Charlie” was an imaginary friend who had had to go away, and Jessica hadn’t expected him to believe it, they’d been so close after all. But to her surprise, eventually Jason did come to accept that he had never had a brother, and to stop ever mentioning the name Charlie again.

But Jessica couldn’t turn her back on Charles, not knowing all along that she was allowing him to remain in the hospital, leaving him to suffer for her own mistakes. So she kept up the visits, taking only Aunt Carol into her confidence. Sometimes Charles would ask about Jason and Alison and when he was going to see them again, but Jessica would make up some excuse, and after a while he just stopped asking. Life went on.

 

Mary:

They were moving her to another facility.

No one had told her why at first, and she only found out when she overheard an argument between Jessica and Kenneth.

“We can’t have them in the same facility,” Kenneth hissed. “She’s got to go.” With growing horror, Mary listened to how Charles stood accused of exactly the same crime as her, on equally flimsy evidence, and how he was about to be committed to this very same institution. “Like mother, like son. Bad blood will out. I should never have let you convince me to take him in.”

So. They were going to write Charles out of existence, lock him away in a facility and never speak his name, they were going to put him through exactly what had been done to her. And Mary was sure that Charles was no more guilty than she was. Yet that old stuffed shirt Kenneth DiLaurentis was determined to hide him away, never speak of him again, wipe the stain of Charles clean just as the family had hidden away Mary.

She’d been led to believe that her baby was going to have a better life with Jessica and Kenneth, but now he was being condemned to the same fate that Jessica had condemned her to. All that horseshit about how they believed Charles was in danger in her care, and now look what had happened to him in theirs. In that moment Mary determined that as soon as she was free, she would track down Charles, build the life with him that had been denied.

And she would get her revenge on Jessica once and for all, take everything from her just as Jessica had taken everything from Mary.

Jessica:

Mary discharged herself from the facility altogether when they were 28. Radley had been warned that if she ever attempted to make contact with Charles in any way, they were to contact Jessica immediately and have Mary removed from the premises, or risk losing the regular donations that Jessica made to them every year. However, there had been one occasion when Jessica was visiting Charles and he’d made reference to “when you visited me on Sunday”, a day when Jessica had been in the emergency room all day after Jason had broken his arm after a fall down some stairs. So she knew what must have happened.

Mary, posing as Jessica, must have managed to sneak in and visit Charles anyway.

A code word was agreed after that, one that only Jessica knew so that Mary could never get that far again, and that worked. Charles wasn’t aware of what had happened, and Jessica kept it that way. He didn’t know Jessica had a twin, neither did Jason or Alison. In time, that particular visit was forgotten about and never mentioned again. Mary left the country, and for a long time Jessica heard no more from her. But she was always looking over her shoulder, waiting for the time when Mary would make contact again, waiting for all the secrets she had tried so hard to hide to be exposed.

Mary:

She hadn’t tried going back to Radley after the day she was stopped at the door and presented with the code word. Initially, she had travelled, not setting foot in the US for years, unable to bear being so near to her son and yet so far. Eventually, the pull became too strong, and Mary returned to Rosewood, curious to know what had become of Charles, of her family. She watched unseen as cracks developed in Jessica and Kenneth’s relationship, as Jason turned to drink, as Alison displayed the same need she remembered in Jessica from so long ago to be Number 1 in everyone else’s lives. So, this was what the children brought up by Jessica and Kenneth had turned into. Who would Charles be now if he had remained in their care, would his life have turned out the same way as those of his cousins?

One day, she’d seen Jason walk past her with some girl, and the girl had turned around and looked in her direction, and in that moment, Mary knew that the girl was her child. Something so major had happened, and Mary, her mother, hadn’t even known.

She had been kept out of her child’s life for so many years. But Mary determined in that moment that it was time to take control once more, that when the time was right she would reach out, build the relationship with her daughter that she had been denied, make up for all the years she had missed out on. And if she could do anything to bring down her sister, then she would do that too.

 

Mary looked down at her sister’s dead face. All those years, Jessica had accused Mary of digging her own grave. Instead, Mary was now digging Jessica’s. It was over.

But as she shovelled dirt over her, just as Jessica had done to Alison, a part of her still wondered what might have been.


End file.
